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Day 20 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Compass Box Flaming Heart 2022

Posted on December 20, 2024

Day 20 - Compass Box Flaming Heart 2022 Edition

by Evan

We have featured Compass Box quite a bit over the years in both whisky tastings and our prior decade plus of whisky calendars. Here is a short run-through what has appeared in calendars of yesteryear:

Compass Box Orchard House – 2023 KWM Whisky Calendar
Compass Box Spice Tree – 2019 KWM Whisky Calendar
Compass Box Story of the Spaniard – 2018 KWM Whisky Calendar
Compass Box Peat Monster – 2018 KWM Whisky Calendar
Compass Box The Great King Street Artist’s Blend – 2016 KWM Whisky Calendar
Compass Box The Great King Street Glasgow Blend – 2015 KWM Whisky Calendar

We are incredibly fortunately to have a lengthy history with Compass Box. In the past, the company has gifted Kensington Wine Market with bespoke blends for our store’s 25th and 30th anniversaries, as well as a quite a few single marrying casks from the Compass Box Great King Street series.

The bottle we will be tasting today is actually a special edition that was originally released in 2022. The reason it is still currently available is that Compass Box makes a good quantity of their limited editions when possible, and because the importer that brought it in luckily brought in a good amount of it. The fact that we still have enough to put it in the KWM Not An Advent Calendar is fortunate, because this bottle is a peat lover’s dream.

(Above: Link to a review of a trio of Compass Box Flaming Heart Editions by Whisky On The West Coast)

The 2022 Edition of Flaming Heart is the 7th Edition in the series, which itself dates back to 2006. Each edition in the series has been bottled at 48.9% or 49% ABV, and has focused on the interplay between peat smoke and French Oak. That combination has made each release sought after by many whisky fans the world over. This series is also central to one of the run-ins Compass Box has been unlucky enough to have with the Scotch Whisky Association over the years.

The 5th release of Flaming heart, which was released in celebration of Compass Box’s 15th Anniversary in 2015, created a stir with the SWA because Compass box revealed the entire recipe — or makeup – of their blend on their website. The SWA told them that was a no-no, and that they were not allowed to disclose which distilleries’ whiskies were used or the specific age of each component in the blend. This greatly annoyed many a whisky geek, and the cries from our collective basements could be heard the world ‘round. At least that is how I remember it.

What was the result of all the hubbub? Well, you can still get a very detailed recipe for Compass Box releases like this one, but the specific age of the...

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Day 19 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - G&M Glentauchers 2000 KWM Cask

Posted on December 19, 2024

Day 19 - G&M CC Glentauchers 2000 KWM Cask

By Evan

Okay, for this series in our 2024 Not An Advent Calendar have had two older teenage single malts, and one toddler Texas bourbon. Today let's try something a wee bit older. Say hello to the 23-year-old Gordon & MacPhail Connoisseurs Choice Glentauchers KWM Cask.

Can you believe this 23-year-old Single Malt Scotch was distilled in the year 2000? It can't even be considered a millennial! It is a 23-year-old Gen Z whisky. I feel ancient and decrepit just pondering that.

Luckily, we have two much older things to talk about while we ignore our own approaching best before dates thanks to this whisky: Gordon & MacPhail and Glentauchers Distillery. As mentioned in an earlier post, Gordon & MacPhail started as a grocery store in 1895. Glentauchers distillery is only slightly younger than that.

Glentauchers was founded in 1897 by James Buchanan and W.P. Lowrie, with production starting in 1898. James Buchanan & Co. had taken majority control of the distillery just under a decade later in 1906, and in 1915, that company merged with Dewar's. A few other things happened ownership-wise over the following decades, two world wars and other stuff that made the news at the time. What is important for Glentauchers as it is now is that in 1985, DCL (the owners at that point) mothballed the distillery. That’s right, Glentauchers survived the big distillery cull of 1983 only to get the axe two years later. The distillery was silent until 1992 when it was revived by Allied Distillers. Allied was taken over by Chivas Brothers / Pernod Ricard in 2005.

Pernod Ricard owns the distillery to this day, and in the past few years they have installed new equipment that has enabled it to be carbon-neutral. Production-wise, Glentauchers can be considered mid-sized by Scottish Single Malt Distillery standards. Its ~4 million litres of spirit output annually place it in the top 40 of the 150 or so currently operating malt distilleries in the country.

The Glentauchers Distillery is located in Mulben, which is just west of Keith. It’s nearest distillery neighbours include Auchroisk Distillery, which is a five-minute drive to the west, and if you take a seven-minute drive east to Keith, you will be able to reach Strathmill, Glen Keith, and the very picturesque Strathisla Distillery.

Given its relative output, it is a bit surprising that very few official bottlings of Glentauchers are available – and none currently come to Canada. The distillery’s production is nearly entirely earmarked for blending as it plays a prominent roll in Ballentine's as well as the Buchanan’s and Black & White Blended Scotch Whisky brands.

The style and qualities of Glentauchers Single Malt make it a favourit...

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Day 18 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Still Austin Cask Strength Bourbon

Posted on December 18, 2024

Day 18 - Still Austin Cask Strength Bourbon – 58%

By Evan

Well, it took going through 2/3 of our KWM 2024 Not Advent Calendar tasting series, but I finally managed to sneak in a Bourbon!

To all of you Bourbon lovers out there: You’re welcome. I know — I am pretty amazing. And incredibly humble. I mean handsome.

To all of you Bourbon haters out there, and Andrew: I am sorry — but not that sorry.

When it comes to Bourbon, there is a still-common misconception that all Bourbon has to be made in the state of Kentucky. This is wrong. It just often seems like all Bourbon comes from Kentucky when all you see on liquor store shelves are the likes of Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Buffalo Trace, and other Kentucky Straight Bourbons. For quite a while Kentucky has been the de facto Bourbon Whiskey Producer in the USA, producing about 95% of all Bourbon made. This is simply because Kentucky is where most of the distilleries that survived Prohibition are located. Outside of Kentucky, there is only one massive distillery in Indiana that has operated for most of that time as well.

More people are becoming aware of the truth – that Bourbon can be made anywhere in the USA. Much of this awareness coincides with the tremendous increase we have seen in Bourbon Whiskey released from distilleries in other states. A lot of what we have seen comes from smaller and younger craft distilleries, but there are some big players making Bourbon in the likes of Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, and other areas as well. States such as Colorado, California, Texas, Virginia, Washington and more have become hotbeds of craft Bourbon and Whiskey production over the past decade.

Still Austin Whiskey Co. and Distillery resides in Austin, Texas. It opened it doors in 2017, having been co-founded by six fellow Austinites three years earlier. It was the first distillery to open and operate within the city since Prohibition.

The distillery prides itself on being grain to glass – a concept we touched on a bit with Kilchoman’s 100% Islay KWM Cask we tasted on Day 5, Lochlea’s Cask Strength Batch 2 from Day 7, and the Daftmill 15 Year Old we tasted in the 2023 KWM Whisky Calendar. There are local distilleries that have focused on this as well, as we discovered in prior whisky calendars with Shelter Point Distillery and Eau Claire Distillery. For Still Austin, being grain to glass means sticking as local as possible for sourcing grain all the way through maturation and bottling.

Kind of like Kensington Wine Market, Still Austin wouldn't exist without Nancy. For us, Nancy refers to Nancy Carten, the founder and owner of KWM until 2015, when she sold the company to Andrew Ferguson.

Still Austin Distillery’s Nancy is not a person, though. It is their continuous still tha...

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Day 17 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Scotch Malt Whisky Society 18.60

Posted on December 17, 2024

Day 17 — Scotch Malt Whisky Society 18.60 — SUPPING SHERRY FROM POLISHED WOODEN CUPS – 55.5%

by Evan

It is tradition for us to include a whisky bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in each year’s KWM Whisky Calendar. This year, we are featuring one that was bottled exclusively for Canada – to celebrate Canada Day, even. This is SMWS 18.60 — SUPPING SHERRY FROM POLISHED WOODEN CUPS.

Here is your Scotch Malt Whisky Society information, or refresher, depending on what you already know. The Scotch Malt Whisky Society – or SMWS as it will now be referred to keep my verbosity from hitting Dickensian levels – was founded in Edinburgh in 1983 by a group of whisky lovers headed by a gentleman named Pip Hills. Over the years, it went from a small whisky club to something that could nearly be classified as a movement (if not a religion, which some members might argue it is), with 26 chapters and 40,000 members now found around the world. Canada’s own SMWS Chapter came into being in 2011, with Kensington Wine Market being it’s first exclusive retail partner. KWM and other shops host monthly Outturn tastings, featuring 6 to 7 new sample bottles, twelve times a year.

To purchase SMWS bottles, you do have to be an SMWS Member. Do not worry, though, this is not like joining Fight Club. Rules number one and two for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society are that EVERY member talks about the SMWS. Members of the SMWS both in Canada and world-wide tend to enjoy talking about whisky — specifically single cask and cask strength whisky — quite a lot. There are two ways to become an SMWS member.

The first is by purchasing an annual membership from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society.
The second is to purchase an SMWS bottle that costs more than $180. That first year of membership is included in that purchase.

But what do we taste? We single casks bottled at cask strength like this for the most part, which are codified numerically and given fanciful names to entice you without overtly revealing which distillery the dram came from.

Let's break this SMWS 18.60 down to give an example. If you look at the actual bottle or the web page full of this bottle’s information, you will find that the name of the distillery is not listed anywhere. The information you are looking for is codified in that series of numbers.

The SMWS has an ongoing numerical list of distilleries it has bottled over its 40+ year history. The first distillery it ever bottled was Glenfarclas, which is classified as distillery 1. Glenlivet was the 2nd distillery to be bottled, so it is distillery 2. Bowmore is 3, Highland Park is 4, Auchentoshan is 5, and so on. The SMWS is up ...

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Day 16 - KWM 2024 This Is Not An Advent Calendar - Boutique-y 18 Year Highland Single Malt (Peated)

Posted on January 30, 2025

Day 16 — Boutique-y 18 Year Highland Single Malt (Peated) — 45.8%

By Evan

Today we will be exploring a release from That Boutique-Y Whisky Company for the third time in this year’s KWM Not An Advent Calendar Tasting set. Like the 30-Year-Old Blended Grain Whisky we tasted back on day three in this series, this bottling is part of Boutique-Y’s current core range. Say hello to the Boutique-Y Highland 18-Year-Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky!

As often happens with That Boutique-Y Whisky Company releases, we once again have a bit of a mystery on our hands. The label shows a stag against a green background, with an ear tag that reads “Highland Peated”.

There is no information on exactly which distillery this single malt comes from, and it could possibly change from small batch to small batch. The current iteration is rumoured to be peated Knockdhu though, which would be great since we have never had a Knockdhu in our whisky calendars before from what I can recall! So let’s take that notion as fact and talk a little bit about the Knockdhu distillery.

Knockdhu was founded back in 1893, and more or less operated steadily for the next 100 years – except for short closures during the great depression and World War II — until the great Scottish distillery cull of 1983 nearly killed it for good. Knockdhu was mothballed at that time by then-owners DCL, but in 1988 a buyer by the name of Inver House was found. Inver House Distillers itself was founded in 1964 and lead the newly built Glen Flagler malt Distillery and Garnheath grain distillery on the same site in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire in the Scottish Lowlands. Glen Flagler and Garnheath were closed never to reopen in 1985 and 1986 respectively, a few years before the Knockdhu Distillery purchase.

After its purchase of Knockdhu in 1988, Inver House went on to add a few more distilleries to its portfolio over the following decade. Speyburn (purchased in 1991), Pulteney (acquired in 1995), Balblair (purchased in 1996) Balmenach (purchased in 1997), are all still part of the Inver House lineup, along with Knockdhu. Inver House Distillers itself changed hands a few times during its lifespan, but has been owned by the big-in-Asia company Thai Beverage since 2006.

Ever had an official bottling of Knockdhu? It might be hard to know. Official bottlings are not actually given the distillery name for release. Instead, they are given the name anCnoc, possibly to avoid confusion with another Scottish distillery named Knockando. Funny how attempting to avoid confusion often makes things even more confusing instead, isn’t it?

At least they didn’t go with Chamuis Dhu, I suppose.

The Knockdhu Distillery resides in the village of Knock within Aberdeenshire. This puts the distillery in the East Highlands o...

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